FLEXIBLE SPECIALIZATION - THE APPLICATION OF THEORY IN A POOR-COUNTRY CONTEXT - LEON, MEXICO

Flexible specialization models have been developed for western Europe, where their essential features are the various flexibilities of labour and capital use, and spatially the linking of a large number of associated forms horizontally. In third world contexts such structures have been bypassed in research, though they may be more typical than the multinational corporations most studied. A field study was conducted in Leon, where the Mexican shoe provisions and tanning industries are flexible in somewhat different ways to the European model, with little machine flexibility but substantial ability of labour to adjust to changes in demand. Flexibility is also associated with a complex pattern of horizontal and vertical linkage within a single Industrial District, where there are institutions and organizations that help small firms. An area which provides flexibility in terms of technology, entrepreneurship and labour, encourages the rapid creation of firms, since entry to the industry is very easy. In some interpretations, flexibility is related to the informal sector, when firms go underground as an adjustment to recession times. In Leon, informal firms products, but also providing bases for the creation of new firms and new entrepreneurs. They are functional rather than dysfunctional to the regional economy; but they are not significance for regional industrial planning, particularly of the secondary cities where the Industrial Districts are likely to occur, but support to secondary cities needs to be selective.